Category Archives: HRA Downloads

I’m being featured as Audioengine’s independent artist this month (May!).

Help yourself to the free song download of mine they are offering.

If you are looking for computer audio or Bluetooth active wireless speakers, the Audioengine HD3’s just received a 2018 Editor’s Choice from PCMag. Lots of high quality and good sounding wired and wireless solutions have been coming from Audioengineusa.com for many years now. If you’re looking, check them out too.

Between now and the New Year (yes it will be 2018…) any full album you purchase from my pages for MQA masters *or* DSD masters will be acknowledged with a big MAHALO email from me containing a simple way for you to download any OTHER album of mine you want.

You can mix and match DSD and MQA all you have to do is reply to the thank you email I’ll send after your purchase and tell me which album you want to download for free.

You buy one or more with a download order, and I’ll send you a code/link to get one of your choice! Any format, any resolution, you decide.

Easy peasy. You *won’t* have to volunteer your maiden middle name, the 2nd, 4th, and 9th digits of your Social Security Number, your Bitcoin wallet password, or your plans for the holiday season. Just tell me which album!

Here are the links to purchase from to get a free album.

For MQA Masters (stereo only) in all resolutions (16/44 to 24/352.8) use this link:

As the year winds down you may be wandering, careening, catapulting, waltzing, wistfully walking, twist and shouting, meditating, mirroring, toe stepping, or broad jumping towards the great unknown in 2018…

I hope some music helps ease the transition and helps make it enjoyable for you and those surrounding you.

Be well – thank you for all the continued huge welcome and aloha you have shown me and my music through the year. Send this email or post to anyone you think might want to hear some.

With Aloha! Have some happy holidays!

– DE

PS… Some are asking me where I got that photo of the Golden Gate. I got it from seat 37J (if I remember that right)

PS2 (remember those? if you do you are probably nearly as old as me)………..If you too also wondering how the hell you might play *both* DSD *and* MQA audio files through a single setup (ideally one that can be mobile with battery and all the right quality and support for things like headphone amplification and matched impedances, and any other details that make it easier to just listen to well recorded digital music *INCLUDING* streaming MQA such as from TIDAL)…. then you may have to look no further.

Witness the new release of the iFI-audio USB DAC and headphone amp, the Nano iDSD BL (for Black Label). I saw it onsale at Amazon yesterday for $199…..

The small Nano needs a PC/MAC computer or smartphone connected to it (ie, it’s not a player just a DAC).

…is present high fidelity recordings of my stuff to as many people as possible. In the past this has been done using special gear which used to be a lot more expensive than it is today but still requires quite a bit of knowledge and interest in buying and setting up hi-res fidelity.

Today that has improved because they are ways to stream hi-res that don’t require any special hardware at all. I’ve been an MQA partner (artist/content) for over a year now and released a lot of 24-bit downloads of my work.

Now for the first time I have a streaming 16-bit CD version of the hi-res that will soon be on TIDAL and 7Digital/Onkyo as well as Deezer as remastered MQA. This was folded from the 16/352.8kHz DXD remaster.

On TIDAL’s HiFi subscription ($19.99/mo) you can hear full MQA masters and other 24/96 masters from thousands of titles coming from Warner. This includes the likes of Tom Petty, Costello, Black Sabbath, JT, Joni, CSNY, Talking Heads, Emmylou, Albert King, Alice Cooper, Bowie, America, The Who, The Doors, The Band…you get the idea.

With the 16-bit streaming version of hi-res MQA I can print the CDs that will sound just as good. Anyone with MQA decoding at their end will hear the full resolution on these hi-res albums as they get released.

For now, you can try streaming the whole album at the link! It’s not lossless MQA streaming from CDBaby like it is on TIDAL but maybe that’s the point cause it still sounds good.

21 albums, EPs and singles ranging from CD master to DXD (24/352.8) as folded MQA encoded PCM now range in price up to just $19.95 for the DXD masters.

There are some free downloads here as well as announced earlier.

All of the MQA masters can be played on *any* software media player or iPhone/Android. They sound good that way, much better than CD to my ears every time. I’m not alone in that conclusion of course.

The benefit of the MQA encoding corrects time smearing also known as pre- and post-ringing effects in the recording. This is an artifact of most PCM recordings without MQA.

The result is a much more natural sounding playback, easier on the ears and a lot nicer to listen to. All my masters benefited from this including early CD releases (dating 20+ years ago) and more recent DSD masters converted to PCM then encoded as MQA by MQA Ltd.

If you have an MQA DAC the hi-res albums/tracks above 20kHz get unfolded and played in their full resolution up to 352.8kHz. Yes they do sound better but the DAC can be added anytime and you still enjoy very high quality recordings with the gear and software you have today.

I have listened to all the DXD masters without unfolding (no MQA DAC), and am always pleased and surprised by the sound quality, even without MQA decoding.

I like MQA because it provides that easy to play approach, no matter what. You can even burn these to a CD and play them in your car too. It supports lossless streaming in low bandwidth with full resolution on the playback end. Quite amazing. TIDAL is offering this now if you are interested.

If you download from my site at http://davidelias-mqa.com just be sure to choose a Bandcamp PCM format that is lossless. It should be one or more of these: FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIF. Most things play ALAC including Apple and these are much smaller files than AIF. FLAC is similarly smaller than WAV for PC.

Remember too that if you buy online at Bandcamp, you get access to the songs from your computer or Smartphone forever in addition to being able to download as often as you need to in whatever format you want. NOTE: Streaming from Bandcamp today does not support MQA decoding! It may in the future if/when BC provides lossless streaming. I find it to be quite good anyway.

One final note regarding BlueSound and some NAD player users. It appears that most of the BlueSound players I’ve been made aware of by listeners require the downloaded audio files to be renamed such that they end with “.mqa” (no quotes of course). This allows the player to properly identify MQA audio files and decode them correctly.

Email me from my web contact page if you have any questions about MQA, I’ll do my best to help clarify.

More for some less for others…

Many of us including me started downloading MP3 music online in the mid 90’s. It sucked then. We used 33k or then advanced 56k modems over telephone dialup lines. This means we were getting our audio file data at the rates of 4.2KB, or 7.2KB per second.

Everything about download or transfer speed today is measured in either MB/s or even GB/s. An MB/s is 1000 times faster than a KB/s. A GB/s is 1,000,000 times faster than a KB/s. I feel old.

Songs in MP3 format were then and are still often 1MB data per minute of music. So a 4 minute song (4MB data) took anywhere from say 16 minutes to maybe 10 minutes top speed to download…. zzzz …. zzzz ….. zzzz …… one song, not one album.

A CD version of that same song as a WAV or AIF off the disc took about 10 times as long to download! Now you see why MP3 was so popular even though it didn’t sound great, and why iTunes took advantage of that when they opened their store for downloads in 2004.

(Oops I forgot to mention that by 2004 there was plenty of Cable Modem and DSL and other much much faster internet to the home, but Apple and everyone else was used to MP3 crappy lossy quality by then….so no one adapted to the fact that good quality was also pretty easy to download. Then FLAC format came along and compressed the WAV file size by around half without loss of any music info. Still no one disrupted the money machine called iTunes, even when they made their own FLAC and called it ALAC and could have delivered CD quality back then no problem and no cost.)

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Fast Forward to 2009. I started offering DSD downloads of my SACDs to mostly the owners of Sony Playstation3’s since most of the SACD players of that day could not play what was called a DSD Disc (data disc with DSD files) as defined by Sony then.

The DSD Disc was literally a DVD data disc burned with the DSD song files (as DSF types with tags or DFF without tags) in a specific folder hierarchy that allowed players of the day to read the data files and play the music. It broke the mold Sony had created for watermarked copy protection on SACD. You still couldn’t rip SACDs (one can today with the right gear and software).

No one came…

Well a few did, but even though Internet was overall speedy by then (cable modem download speed in Hilo in 2009 was about 650KB/s) it still was not mainstream or always easy to download the large ISO image (to burn the DVD with) for many out there.

My download then was a single 2GB image (zipped ISO file) to burn a DVD disc with to play the audio files on something, either on your computer or on the DVD Disc playing in your Playstation3 or special Sony or Onkyo SACD players that handled DSD Disc as well as SACD.

zzzz..zzz.zzz.zzzzzz

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Rapid Forward to 2017 when Hilo’s Time Warner Cable Modem in some people’s homes breaks the speed meter on speedtest.net at 20MB/s and above as high as maybe 26MB/s.

So while it is easy for some to download hi-res audio, it’s not easy for others. Lots of others. Worldwide. In fact 5 miles up the road from Hilo here in East Hawaii many people may not even be able to get cable modems from Time Warner and so use a much slower and costlier satellite confiugration. If they are in the forest blocking the satellite option and more than a few miles from the nearest telephone wire center (for DSL), forget about it.

By 2011 I moved away from the DSD Disc (ISO) format and just started offering to download the DSF files from my website. Then in 2013 a number of retailers came online to offer DSD downloads and that was great.

Nothing against large file downloads (I guess averages of my stereo DSD files are somewhere around 200MB per song and multichannel maybe 500 per song) but a lot of people around the world and in the US still have trouble with this today. Those files can be hard to retrieve and they take up a lot of space if you have a lot of music. (And they are hard to fit more than a small number into your smartphone.)

Problems often come from slow or interrupted Internet links, confusion on what to even do with files once they are downloaded, or combinations of other things like Safari browsers that insert .TXT file extensions on downloaded files because the server they got the (DSD) file from (like Dropbox) does not properly identify the MIME type for .DSF and .DFF music files.

Aren’t you sorry you asked?

It’s enough to … … … …. ………

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A few years ago I thought I’d offer to make downloads and their problems go away for those not interested in the challenge but who wanted the music. So I provided a way to purchase the music as a little USB stick I would then mail to you. You get the USB stick, put it in your computer or BDP player and get right to it.

No one came….

Today I am offering a similar thing but this time using DVD discs as data.

These are just the same kind of good quality DVD discs anyone could burn files to off their PC/Mac for either video or just data. A blank single layer (SL), single sided disc has a 4.7 GB capacity. A double layer (DL) has twice that or 8.5GB. My multichannel SACDs require either 2 SL DVDs or 1 DL DVD.

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Why would I do that you ask?

If you don’t like downloading large files but want to listen to the excellent qualities of DSD as the native source format for the hi-res recordings I have released, you might try buying the DVD version and just getting it in the mail.

The sound files are 100% identical to what is online for download. They are the same as what is/was on the SACDs for that matter. Many of my DSD titles were never SACD. These are now all available on DVD disc as well, not just as downloads.

You just pop the DVD into your OPPO or Sony or other Blu-ray/SACD/DVD/CD player (aka BDP for Blu-ray Disc Player) and select Music from from the menu. On my OPPO 103 this is the first icon after the disc (audio CD/video DVD) icon and is called “Music”.

The DVD will then show up on your screen as a “Data Disc” choice (as opposed to, say “USB”). Selecting the Data Disc media then shows the album song list just as it would from a CD or SACD.

Click on a song, play and enjoy. It continues to play songs from there to the end of the list like any CD/SACD.

If you like (and highly suggested by me), just copy the original DVD data to your computer or any backup media you use. In other words, back it up when it’s brand new. No DRM – if you don’t know what that means, good on you.

You can also play the files on your computer from your software media player through your DAC as DoP like any other DSD download. Just put the disc in the computer CD/DVD drive (just a CD drive won’t work) and select those files from your media player software (JRiver, Amarra, Audirvana….). They then play DSD through your external DSD DAC (Mytek, iFi Audio, OPPO….).

DSD on DVD Data Discs. Hope this helps.

Questions about DVD Data Discs? Post a reply and I’ll answer you best I can.

I’ve come to think of MQA as two completely different faces in one container. This appears to be fully misunderstood by many.

On one hand MQA is a time coherence correction tool that makes quantum leaps in restoring the ambient synchronization of frequency and location arrival of sound to the listener. It does this with both analog recording ADC and playback DAC knowledge applied to remove pre- and post-ringing echoes that typically create huge miscues to the listener’s ear on what was played when, and from where in the room on the recording. These miscues are cause for endless fatiguing analysis and corrections done by the human ear which is monumentally sensitive to timing and location, much more so than to pitch (frequency) itself.

The other face (unrelated entirely) of MQA is its ingenious methods of folding hi-res recordings (up to 24/384kHz) to nothing greater than 24/48kHz in any lossless PCM format including the popular file compressed formats of FLAC (PC) and ALAC (Mac). This allows the full spectrum of sound and air/harmonics to be restored on playback by MQA enabled DACs using little more than, or even less than 1mbps bandwidth on transport and delivery to the DAC.

Folding is 100% lossless with regard to the noise floor in the recording. No ambiguities there whatsoever. The fast (compressed) delivery of the data reduces the time and space required to allow quick and easy transport over Internet for downloads or streaming as well as on standard CD capacity disks. This is almost 20x smaller than the data/bandwidth footprint of a WAV or AIF hi-res PCM download at 24/384k and the popular DXD (24/352.8k). The latter monstrous file sizes prohibit downloads for almost everyone and streaming is not possible at all. MQA solves this problem with 100% bit perfect accuracy in a package almost 20 times smaller on delivery.

So MQA’s two-faced solution restores an edgeless natural enjoyable ambient sound to PCM masters at any resolution by removing brickwall filter imposed edges as time smearing. And MQA delivers in a package (PCM format) that fully accommodates all known media requirements for users including (I hope!) future wireless lossless full resolution transmissions.

All this is done with full portability by the user to any and all media devices for playback including non-MQA equipment. CD ripping and format conversions (e.g., between FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIF) can be done by anyone at anytime with the full preservation of the MQA encoding. Royalties are paid by the sources (record labels, MQA compatible equipment mfgs, streaming services) not unlike CD, Dolby, DTS, and many other popular digital audio technologies used by the recording and film industries for many decades.

Lucky $7 Sale – Aloha to Lester…

We were quite lucky in Hawaii this Labor Day weekend with the oncoming Cat 4 hurricane Lester (2nd approaching in consecutive weekends) when it chose (with Pele’s urging) to move north and bypass all islands. Here it is as of this morning. Bad ass!

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I have a Lucky $7 album download price on all of my hi-res albums that are now encoded as PCM using MQA to improve the PCM sound quality as well as reduce the size of the files you download.

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Here’s the deal – When you buy any of these album downloads online at http://davidelias-mqa.com you can checkout using the “code name” below to get 70% off. That will adjust the price of the album to $7.

These are all hi-res! If you have an MQA DAC today it will unfold the Studio Authenticated MQA hi-res audio above 24/44.1 (up to 352.8kHz) and play it.

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If you don’t have a MQA DAC today, you can still play these great sounding recordings on any player you have (iTunes, smartphone, JRiver, Audirvana, Amarra, foobar2000). If you get the MQA DAC later or it becomes available in the player you are using later (based on whoever makes the media player adopting MQA) it will unfold the hi-res at that time.

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Either way, you can download the albums for $7 now until midnight (UTC which is Greenwich Mean Time) on Tuesday September 6th.

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Use the code above (like: labor2016sampler) for the album you are buying and it will discount the price by 70% which will be $7.

You can checkout using a credit card or PayPal account, both are secure encrypted by PayPal.

(“Name Your Price” is an option as well, up to you or leave blank to keep price at $7.)

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When it comes to actually downloading the files make sure you choose one of these formats (click the dropdown arrow to see all the choices on download): FLAC, ALAC, AIFF, WAV.

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I recommend FLAC which is the original master uploaded. MQA works fine in the 3 other lossless formats as well but keeping it as FLAC is the simplest I’ve found in a few cases. Bandcamp lets you down any or all of the formats it offers so you can try more than one. If you want an MP3 copy for your phone or whatever that’s ok too, just be aware it won’t play as MQA authenticated.

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The other nice thing here is that Bandcamp allows you to stream the albums you buy forever after from the website page — or download their smartphone app (iPhone/Android).

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Mahalo to All and Happy Holiday – anywhere you go, you always take the weather :)

The stereo mixes I’ve done for everything always use “the room” in the mix which is usually largely based on 2 or more rear wall mics capturing those reflections at “the source” (ie the wall) as well as high up (ie, the ceiling).

So I mix the stereo as well as multichannel using those tracks (2 stereo or sometimes 3 with 1 mono). In that way I avoid having to use artificial reverb and delay which is so commonly used (both analog and digital versions of these) in studios that most engineers/producers don’t think twice about it.

By using ambient sound in the mix to bring back the natural reverb and delay (slapback sounds from the wall vs the stage) I can recreate a very authentic reproduction that has nothing artificial added. Just EQ and panning (right and left) during the mix to restore the original sounds and locations in the room.

I started doing this on my own on my very first CD in 1995 (Lost in the Green). I went on to record several other CDs in that fashion through 2001 with Half An Hour Away which I recorded myself in an acoustically beautiful small performance theater in Half Moon Bay on the SF Coast on Hwy 1. Me and my trio at the time (Gary on flute/tenor sax, Lisa on mandolin) played live in the otherwise empty hall for about 4 hours one afternoon with (local fan) director Michael’s permission. I had mics in the audience front rows as well as back at the high seats in the rear wall row. I mixed the 8 total tracks to stereo analog and printed it.

Within a year or two I was planning and then recording “The Window” to DSD in a fancy studio in Boulder using the same approach. They (local engineers) said I couldn’t do it and shouldn’t try — putting all musicians in the same room without isolation (no real traps between musicians!) and creating the live session with as few mics as possible in the room. But I said we should try it just to see what happened so they shrugged and said ok…….. rest is good history for me :)

I think (my ears tell me) that MQA is exactly what was needed to round out the edges imposed by PCM which is how I recorded and mastered those original CDs. It is the coup de gras for returning the original ambient sound characteristics of the room and performance.

Introducing you to MQA with 4 songs.

UPDATED Jan 18, 2017
These 4 songs now download for $4. There is 1 free track available
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Here is how MQA Ltd. described me in their newsletter this week (emphasis is mine):

MQA Artist Release
Sound quality has been a driving motivation for singer-songwriter David Elias since he started recording his music digitally more than 20 years ago. On listening to some of his earliest recordings encoded with MQA, David noted, “The original intention and sounds are much more accurately represented [with MQA] and are therefore much, much more enjoyable to listen to. The convenience of MQA’s smaller file size is an additional no-brainer.”

This paragraph says a lot for me because I’ve lived with CD and its problems with sound quality as long as everyone else. In fact I had no CDs long after many did, sticking to vinyl and even my own mix tape cassettes (analog ruled) for years after the CD deluge. It sounded better. I liked album covers. What can I say.

I broke my teeth on CD quality recording in 1995 making my first CD in a home studio setup. I recorded to Hi-8 Video Tape at 16/48 on an 8-track Tascam DA-88. I’d recorded myself at times on various tape machines and a few digital boxes for almost 20 years but this was much different.

I listened to a lot of everything I put on tape through that whole process of recording, mixing analog (lengend original Mackie 1202!) to 16/44.1 (Sony TCD-10 DAT) and then mastered on a DyaxisII Workstation. It sounded good and in fact better in the studio than on the final CD that was printed.

Those early CDs and many later recordings were either created or converted to PCM to be moved online one way or another. All my released songs are on YouTube Music now for example, as audio, as well as lots of other places, like 50 or more. The more they travel in the Etherspace the worse they sound generally. They get downsampled and converted into whatever suits the retailer or streaming radio like Pandora (one of my least favorites for sound quality).

But shoots, I want to get heard…otherwise I wouldn’t put music I write out there in the first place.

Enter MQA… I started listening to it in February on hi-res converted music from 2L in Norway. Classical works. I knew some of them from 10+ years prior as SACDs I had actually been given by Morten Lindberg there. 2L put MQA converted masters (DXD conversions which are PCM at 24/352.8) online to try as well as other hi-res formats. I was using a Meridian Explorer2 MQA DAC connected to my Dell Windows 10 notebook running the latest JRiver.

All I can say is I didn’t hear anything I didn’t like, and in some cases heard some things I really really liked.

So I started listening to other MQA encoded tracks. MQA is not a new audio format. It is still linear PCM, just has its own corrections (aka filtering) applied to the encoding of the music.

What I started paying attention to more and more and hearing more and more were the timing coherence corrections in the playback. What PCM has always done to my ears, along with countless others, is present a very sharp unnatural edge to the sound that can get worse for me the louder or harder the music is played. It doesn’t flow like vinyl, cassette, or DSD. Usually it kind of attacks quickly, then disappears. It’s not relaxing, let me put it that way.

MQA encoded tracks I listened to had lost much of that sharp attack, no decay characteristic. They were well presented and much easier to listen to. They positioned things more clearly in the stereo space noticeably including the front and back locations in addition to left and right. The soundstage was then more 2 dimensional with depth as well as 3 dimensional with up and down.

This listening started with a lot of music I didn’t know, yet I was happy to listen to it with open ears so to speak.

Over the next few months, I decided I wanted to hear some of my PCM recordings as MQA and started making inquiries as to how I might do that. In the end, I became an MQA artist partner and have converted my catalog and archives to MQA encoded PCM.

I’ve actually had most of my catalog online as PCM on the Bandcamp site (http://davidelias.bandcamp.com) as CD quality up to 24/88.2 for a couple years now. Now most of that has been updated to download in the smaller FLAC or ALAC MQA encoded files.

Overall, MQA sounded better to me than any CD or hi-res PCM master I had. It doesn’t need much more proof to me. I have read a lot about the “what it is” and “why it works” to understand that better, but after my intro through reading and some YouTubes, I just started listening a lot. I still am.

What About The 4 Songs… The first album on the page at the link above is a free download. You can also stream it as much as you want. Bandcamp lets you download songs in a variety of formats. The default is MP3. Don’t download it as MP3!

MQA requires what’s called a lossless format — The 4 big lossless formats being used out there are the original WAV (PC) and AIF (Mac) and their file (not audio) compressed counterparts FLAC (PC) and ALAC (Mac). Choose one of those when you download from anywhere no matter what the site or music! It is not missing some of its music from the original like MP3!

FLAC and ALAC are roughly 1/2 the size of WAV and AIF. They sound identical and are better at carrying the magic metadata or tags that include all the song and album info for the media player to display when playing the track.

MP3 and Apple’s AAC use math to remove audio data in an original CD or hi-res audio master to make it a much smaller file (in general about 1/10th the size). That was the strategy from the beginning when everyone was dialing up the Internet on modems. It made sense then as one didn’t want to stay online for hours or days to download an album. Apple cemented that approach since iTunes Store came online in 2004. How long will that go on? As long as people buy it I guess.

Excuse Me, What About The 4 Songs… Ok, I have a lot of MQA encoded music I am really kind of hearing for the first time myself. This includes both very good and some not so great recordings (like live public hall stuff through a single $99 Sony stereo mic to DAT).

Most of it got created as a PCM recording. The MQA encoded versions of these tracks changed how they sound to me and took me a lot closer to the original performance whether was studio or live stage. It sounds more like the sound in the room at the time and what was played and I am relaxed when I listen to it because of that.

Go here and try 4 songs at 3 different PCM resolutions, all encoded as MQA

1) If you have an MQA DAC you can hear the full resolution up to 24/352.8 or the limits of your MQA DAC.

2) If you don’t have an MQA DAC you can just play it anyway at 16/44.1, 24/44.1 or 24/48 depending on source track

3) If you get an MQA DAC later (or the media players do it for you) you’ll hear the hi-res then

The song audio resolutions range from CD (16/44.1) hi-res (24/96) to DXD (24/352.8). They are all only about as big as a CD file to download (about 700MB), maybe a little bigger.

CD’s sound better as MQA to me with or without the MQA DAC gear. You can just play them. I’ve had different people tell me the same thing about my stuff. So far I have heard its biggest benefits on the lowest res recordings. I might even know why.

If you have questions you can reply to this email, it just comes to me…I hope you try downloading the tracks. If you have an MQA DAC, don’t stream them, download them!